Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Looking Down on Others

Never is someone so willingly named, or heard named, as the person who has a recognized defect, either physical or moral, and is called by the name of the defect. So-and-so the deaf fellow, the cripple, the hunchback, the madman. Indeed, these people are ordinarily called only by these names, or if we call them by their name when they are not present it's very rare that the other name isn't added. In calling them or hearing them called thus, men seem to themselves to be superior, they enjoy the image of the defect, they feel and in a certain sense remind themselves about their own superiority, self-love is flattered and gratified by it. Add man's eternal and natural hatred toward man which feeds on [2442] and delights in these shameful epithets, also when they are directed toward friends or people who do not matter to him. And these natural causes give rise to the fact that the man with a defect, as named above, almost changes his name to that of his defect, and the others who give him the same name, in their heart of hearts intend and aim without thinking about it to remove him from the number of their fellow men, or place him below their species, a tendency that is proper (and as far as society is concerned, first and foremost) to every social individual. I happened to see someone with a defect, a man of the common people, talking and joking with people about his condition, and they were calling him only by the name of his defect, so that I was never able to hear his own name. And if I have any knowledge of the human heart, believe me, I understood clearly that each of them, every time he called that man contemptuously by that name, felt an inner joy, and a spiteful satisfaction in his own superiority to that fellow creature, and not so much because he was free of that defect as because, being free of it, he could see it and mock it and reproach it in that creature. And, no matter how frequent that epithet was in their mouths, I felt, I knew, that it never came to their lips without an external echo of that internal sense of judgment, of triumph, and of enjoyment.1 (13 May 1822.)

1 This autobiographical anecdote was added to the margins of the manuscript on Z 2442-44 and 2449-50. It may therefore postdate "Ultimo canto di Saffo" (May 1822), where Leopardi expresses Sappho's grief for her "unlovely form" (l. 54, trans. Galassi). In a letter to his sister Paolina of 18 May 1830 (Epistolario, p. 1731), Leopardi describes being called "that hunchback Leopardi." Cf. Z 3058-59 and note.

I know almost no Italian, so it is with trepidation that I suggest "even when they are directed toward friends or people who do not matter to him," rather than "also when they are directed toward friends or people who do not matter to him," as a translation of "anche verso gli amici o gl'indifferenti."